Today in Digital Marketing - Here’s Your CTA: [LISTEN NOW]
Episode Date: August 31, 2020Here come the world’s first voice coupons. Also: California takes a hardline on marketers who run afoul of its new privacy legislation… Yes, Google text ads are gone (at least for some people)... ...and the one simple change to your Instagram content strategy that will get you more engagement. JOIN OUR SLACK COMMUNITY! • Click: http://TodayInDigital.com/slack SPREAD THE WORD: • Tweet It: http://bit.ly/tweet-tidm to preview a tweet you can publish • Review Us: http://RateThisPodcast.com/today ABOUT THE PODCAST: • Produced by: http://engageQ.com • Advertising: http://TodayInDigital.com/ads • Transcripts: See each episode at http://TodayInDigital.com • Theme music: Mark Blevis (all other music licensed by Source Audio) TOD’S SOCIAL MEDIA: • Tod’s agency: http://engageQ.com • LinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/in/todmaffin • Twitter: http://twitter.com/todmaffin • Instagram: http://instagram.com/todmaffin • TikTok: http://tiktok.com/@todmaffin • Twitch: http://twitch.tv/todmaffin SOURCES: https://www.agorapulse.com/social-media-lab/facebook-link-ads-cta/amp/?utm_campaign=TodayInDigital.com https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/30/tech/internet-outage-cloudflare/index.html https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/355245/most-consumers-will-not-shop-in-stores-this-black.html?utm_campaign=TodayInDigital.com https://streetfightmag.com/2020/08/31/california-attorney-general-targets-low-hanging-fruit-for-ccpa-non-compliance/?utm_campaign=TodayInDigital.com https://www.marketingdive.com/news/unilever-target-partner-for-voice-powered-ads-on-peacock/584395/?utm_campaign=TodayInDigital.com https://www.searchenginejournal.com/instagram-carousels/379311/?utm_campaign=TodayInDigital.com https://www.searchenginejournal.com/updated-adsense-reporting/379321/?utm_campaign=TodayInDigital.com https://searchengineland.com/is-google-prepping-to-phase-out-etas-339964?utm_campaign=TodayInDigital.com https://about.ads.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/post/august-2020/asset-performance-ratings-responsive-search-ads?utm_campaign=TodayInDigital.com --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/todayindigital/messageOur Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Today, here they come, the world's first voice coupons.
Also, California takes a hard line on marketers who run afoul of its new privacy legislation.
Yes, Google text ads are gone, at least for some people.
And the one simple change to your Instagram content strategy that will get you more engagement.
It's Monday, August 31st, 2020.
Happy Language Day, Moldova. I'm Todd
Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here is what you missed today in digital marketing.
When you run a Facebook ad, an ad that directs people to a website, one of the options you get
on the ad setup screen is whether you want a CTA. A CTA is a call to action button. Most of the time
people use learn more, but there are all sorts available.
Book now, get show times, send message, and a couple of dozen more.
You don't have to use a CTA button on your link ad,
but most digital marketers have come to believe that you'll get better results
when there's a button that directly tells people the action you want them to take.
But is that assumption true? Those beautiful
bastards at Agorapulse's social media lab have tested it, and I'll have the answer later in
today's episode. More bad news coming for people who run marketing for bricks and mortar stores.
A new study of American consumers by Amersys has found that 62% of people polled said no amount of safety measures will convince them to shop in physical stores this Black Friday.
In fact, when asked directly, do you plan to shop in stores?
Only 4% said yes.
28% said they'll do all their holiday buying online.
So if you don't have your e-commerce website set up
or your email list in shape, start now.
There is a tiny glimmer of hope.
A small number of people said if your prices are cheaper
than what they find online,
then they will take the risk and buy from you in store.
But that small number?
Fewer than one in five shoppers.
We are starting to see the first lawsuits emanating from the California Consumer Privacy Act.
As a refresher, this state legislation says there's a bunch of data you can't collect from
California residents in your marketing efforts. And if you do, you open yourself up to enforcement. Enforcement that
apparently has now started. Quoting Streetfightmag.com, the enforcement period began July 1st
and two months later, numerous firms have received letters from the Attorney General's office about
non-compliance. Multiple major companies, including Walmart, Sephora, and Ring, have been hit with
class action lawsuits, unquote.
One expert they quoted for their article said, quote, it's speculated that California's attorney
general will go after the low-hanging fruit rather than targeting a specific industry.
CCPA enforcement will be centered on egregious violators, for example, those that do not have
a prominent privacy policy link on their website, no do not sell my data
button, and no visible mechanisms to allow customers to exercise their privacy rights, unquote.
If this is the first time you're hearing of this and you do market to people in California,
it is worth doing a quick Google search for CCPA. This applies regardless of what country you're in.
If you're in Canada,
this whole thing stresses you out. You may want to search for the other CCPA,
the Canadian Counseling and Psychotherapy Association.
Is it just me or are the new developments in digital marketing just getting creepy?
Take the new ad running right now on Peacock. That's NBC's streaming service. It's for the shampoo brand Suave, made by Unilever
and sold by Target, among others. The ad listens to the microphone on the device people are watching
on and asks them to say the words, save with Suave. And if they do, they get a $5 coupon to buy it at Target.
NBC calls this an on-command ad
and says it's better than asking people to remember a toll-free number
or a website URL.
Like it or not, these will probably be fairly commonplace in the coming years.
Think about all the voice-reliant devices making their way into consumers' homes.
Alexa, Siri, Portal, Google Assistant. Even if
you don't have those, many TV remote controls these days have voice recognition. Comcast's
X1 and Flex service has this. In Canada, Shaw's Blue Curve uses it. As for those streaming sites
that are funded by advertising rather than a Netflix-type subscription model, that category's
ad revenue was up 31% last quarter
compared to Q2 the previous year.
Instagram, as you know, has three media formats.
Actually, did you know that?
There are photos, videos, and the third, the carousel,
a group of up to 10 media that people can swipe through. Carousels are easy to post in the third, the carousel, a group of up to 10 media that people can swipe through.
Carousels are easy to post in the app, but that format is not yet in the Instagram API,
meaning that if you're trying to post a carousel through your account on, say, Hootsuite or Buffer or Gropulse or Spout Social or whatever,
that service will politely tell you how to do it manually using the Instagram app. Well, now a new study that looked at more
than 22 million posts says, actually, it's probably worth the extra effort. The new research comes
from Social Insider. Of those 22 million posts, they say about 3 million were carousel, and they
found carousels generated the most engagement. Not a huge lift, mind you, but a lift.
In their data set, they found carousels had an average engagement rate per post of 1.92%.
In second place, I know you think I'm going to say videos here, but no, actually images in second place at 1.74%.
Despite everyone saying video first, that format only garnered a 1.45% rate.
Again, not huge differences.
But when they looked at how many slides were in each carousel,
they found something even more interesting.
When all 10 carousel slides were used, engagement climbed to 2%,
and yet only about 1 out of 16 carousel posts maxed out at 10.
Quoting searchenginejournal.com,
quote, engagement drops off after 3 slides, though interestingly picks up again at 8 slides and above.
According to the data, if you're going to post a carousel with more than 3 slides,
you might as well go all out and make it 8 to 10.
Also, a combination of images and videos in the same carousel is found
to generate the highest engagement rate per post, 2.33%, unquote. And finally, according to the
study, carousels with messages that encourage users to swipe left did increase engagement a bit,
and only about 5% of carousels use this messaging. So, to recap, the perfect Instagram posts, it seems, at least right now,
is a carousel with 10 slides, a mix of videos and images,
and where you say, swipe left in the text.
If you use Google Ads, you may have woken up this morning to a bit of a shock.
The option to create text ads is gone.
So put down the pitchfork and the torch.
This isn't happening for everyone, at least not yet.
Google confirms it's testing removing that option to encourage people to use an RSA instead.
An RSA, a responsive search ad, despite its title,
it doesn't mean it's going to look good on both mobile and desktop.
That's usually what we digital marketers think when we hear the word responsive. No, in the case
of Google ads, they mean an ad where you give it a bunch of different headlines and body copies,
and it will try to figure out which variation will get you the better results. Most people in
the space believe Google will eventually just retire regular old school text ads entirely. And this test certainly
supports that theory. If you find yourself in the test and you still want to create text ads,
there is a workaround. Create a campaign, go to your ad group, and you'll find a small link in
the ad group saying switch back to text ads. Again, you'll only find this on the ad group page.
Google isn't the only platform to offer RSAs.
Microsoft has them too. And today they released some data on how theirs perform. They say brands
that use their RSAs saw an increase of 13% in clicks, 16% in conversions, and 6% in conversion
rate. And that brings us to the lightning round.
You may have noticed on Sunday morning a number of websites were down.
Maybe your brand's website was down, apparently all because of CenturyLink,
a big internet service provider, went down.
Apparently those issues have been resolved now.
It is easier now to resize your tiles in Hootsuite Analytics.
You just hover over the bottom right corner and drag to your desired size.
Google has removed historical data older than three years in the AdSense dashboard.
It's not Google Ads, that's the AdSense platform.
And why?
Well, it depends on what part of Google you ask.
Their support page says it'll improve the site's speed and usability.
The announcement said it was done to have more accurate reports.
I'm sure you'll agree with me that neither are true,
and the real reason was cost savings somehow.
And Google search engineer John Mueller this weekend again
busted a common myth about SEO that you may have heard.
He said, again, that word count is not a ranking factor,
nor is it indicative of quality.
He says Google can rank short content just fine.
Oh, and for the Agorapulse study on CTA buttons,
their social media lab tested ad posts without and with CTAs
and found that ads without a call-to-action button
performed better than those with.
I'd venture to say that's the opposite of what most digital marketers assume.
If you're a numbers person, they spent 750 bucks for each of the two ad sets.
Ads with a button got 586 clicks. Without, 639. Ads with the button got about 43,000 reach.
Ads without got more than 48,000. and the average cost per click was 16 cents cheaper
on ads without that call to action button.
There's a link to this episode's description
if you'd like to read the full study
or to listen to a special episode
with the Agorapulse social media lab director
where he talked with me about how companies like yours
can set up their own tests.
You will find that in our Slack community.
It's free to join. Just go to
todayindigital.com slash slack. Also in the exclusive content channel there, extended interviews
with an expert in the TikTok content algorithm and a Google My Business consultant who manages
thousands of GMB profiles. Again, it's all in our Slack community. Go to todayindigital.com
slash slack or just tap the link in this episode's notes. Romania and Ukraine. Most people there actually speak Romanian. In fact, they used to call this Romanian Language Day, but Moldovan is, if not its own language, then certainly an established
dialect of Romanian. That's why the holiday was renamed. The date is not arbitrary. It was on
August 31st in 1989 that the then-Soviet government of Moldova caved into pressure from the Moldovan
people to officially adopt the Moldovan dialect of Romanian as the state language.
And that's it for today. I hope your weekend was restful. I'm Todd Mathen. I'll talk to you tomorrow.